BOOKS.
No book published since the life of Dr. Arnold has produced so strong an impression on the moral imagination and spiritual theology of England as we may expect from these volumes. Even for those who know Mr. Robertson's sermons well, and for many who knew him, as they thought, better than his sermons, the free and full discussion of the highest subjects in the familiar letters so admirably selected by the editor of Mr. Robertson's Life, will give a far clearer insight into his remarkable character and inspire a deeper respect for his clear and manly intellect. Mr. Brooke has done his work as Dr. Stanley did his in writing the life of Arnold, and it is not possible to give higher praise. Mr. Robertson, in speak- ing of Wordsworth's " Prelude," has the following incidental comment on Dr. Stanley's life of Dr. Arnold :—" Some passages," [of the "Prelude"], he says, " are excessively beautiful, the doctrine always pure and clear, like an atmosphere of crystal pellucidness, through which you see all objects without being diverted aside to consider the medium through which they are seen. When you do pause to think of this, you remark, What a clear atmosphere !'
What pure water !' or ' What transparent crystal!' but at first you remark only the object. This, too, I observed of Stanley's life of Arnold. Every one spoke of Arnold, no one stopped to observe how well Stanley had done it. Stanley had merged himself and become transparent. Lord Lansdowne was the first whom I ever heard remark upon the biographer, though I had been on the watch long to see if any one would." Precisely the same may certainly be said of Mr. Brooke's life of Mr. Robertson. Every one will talk of Mr. Robertson and no one of Mr. Brooke, because Mr. Brooke has thought much of his subject, nothing of himself, and hence the figure which he wished to present comes out quite clear and keen, without any interposing haze of literary vapour.
And the subject is of the highest possible interest. The only way in which the higher ethical and spiritual problems acquire complete reality for the mass of mankind, is by being presented in close relation to the life of some man to whom the true solution of them was the first end of living. This was the case with Dr. Arnold, and it was also the case with Mr. Robertson. The differ- ence was that Dr. Arnold's interest in the actual politics and administration of life was wider, stronger, and more buoyant than Mr. Robertson's, while Mr. Robertson's interest in the subtler and more delicate problems of ethical and religious truth was more profound and vital, and his handling of the inner side of religious feeling showed a more sensitive and discriminating touch than Dr. Arnold's, who treated ethics and theology on the side of history and politics, rather than on the side of imaginative insight and moral sensibility. Hence, while the speculative interest of Dr. Arnold's life was limited to such questions as _ the relation of the Church to the State, the true theory of government, and the moral appreciation of great historical eras, the speculative interest of Mr. Robertson's runs deep into the purest theological discussions, the relation of art and poetry to faith, the ethical aspects of socialism and republicanism, and the principles of the higher literary criticism. If the insight into Arnold's nervous strength of conscience and noble concep- tion of politics and history had a wide and practical interest for the English thinkers of 1842, the insight into Mr. Robertson's at once subtle and popular, at once delicate and picturesque treatment of the metaphysical and theological questions which have been discussed so freely among us for the last six years, will have quite as wide and practical an interest for the English thinkers of 1865.
Perhaps the most peculiar moral impression which Mr. Robert- son's character produced on those who were intimate with him
• Life and Letters of Frederick Ir. Robertson, M.A., Incumbent of Trility Chapel, Brighton, 1847-b& Edited by Stopford A.. Brooke, ILA.. late Chaplain to the Embassy
at Berlin. 2 vols., with Portraits. London: Smith, and Co.
only in the second degree, and those who knew him only in the pulpit, was a certain effect of chivalry and romance which was inseparable from him, and which, while it greatly increased his power of fascination over the minds of others, filled himself with self-distrust, and sometimes with alarm, as if he were merely stirring a superficial sentiment into activity when he wished to reach the conscience and the will. This fear is continually recurring in some shape or other in these letters, and though it was pro- bably quite needless in relation to the final effect of his influence on others, it truly represented the point at which his influence first fastened itself on those who knew and heard him. This half-ideal and romantic aspect of his influence was due to a number of causes ; a little perhaps to the symmetry of his figure and his faultless features ; more, to the half-commanding air and military carriage expressing, if not resulting from, his strong passion for a soldier's life, and his eager preparation for it in youth ; still more, to the hectic expression of nervous suffering which his constitutional delicacy, his liability to strong excite- ment, and the lassitude which followed it, left almost always more or less traced upon his face ; and very much also to that delicate poetic sensibility to physical influences which always speaks out plainly in the face, and that, too, in a way to invite even more sympathy than the lines of those deeper and more permanent cares which never vary with the expression of the moment.• All these causes together produced a temperament and an expression which it was singularly difficult to connect with the common-place framework of daily life. A high-strung tension of nerve, due certainly in some measure to disease, seemed to mark ;his face even in repose. The slight under-current of fever which was, with him, due to physical delicacy, heightened the moral colours of his mind, and gave them that air of ideality and romance for which the young are always thirsting. Not only his extraordinary eloquence, but all the constituents which went to make that eloquence, conspired to deepen this impression. His finest ethical qualities, his delicate and genuine sympathies, his quick sense of analogy, the constant pressure of insatiable spiritual wants upon his intellect, his pictorial eye, and sensitive feeling for colour, all combined to melt away the pack-ice of prosaic fact in his neighbourhood, and give him the visionary brilliance of what Mr. Carlyle calls " a radiant being pulsing Auroras " in the half-distance, rather than to connect him with the immediate foreground of life's petty duties and cares. Of course there would be nothing remarkable in this in many a preacher, nor in almost all orators, for it is their function in life to be unreal. It was Mr. Robertson's great aim to be real, and in spite of this he left the impression of which we speak. He acted on the conscience chiefly through the imagination and the emotions. Even his deepest moral feelings were apt to be picturesque. Thus it was impossible to hear him speak, even for an hour, of God or Christian duty without re- cognizing the soldierly feeling which entered everywhere into his theology. It took sometimes the form of a stern retributive doctrine towards moral evil, an indignation which Mr. Ross says truly was at times a " consuming fire ;" sometimes of an enthusi- asm for unhesitating military obedience towards a leader, sometimes for bard regimental discipline, sometimes the form of a passionate pleasure in braving a threatening danger, always of an • ardent desire to see a visible picturesque issue between good and evil, such as Mr. Clough expressed in the words :— " 0 that the armies indeed were arrayed! 0 joy of the Onset,
Sound thou Trumpet of God, come forth, Great Cause, to array us, liing and leader appear, thy soldiers sorrowing seek thee."
And not only were his moral feelings picturesque, but his sensi- tive perceptions translated almost every shade of pleasant or pain- ful feelings which in most men are dumb and inarticulate, into an image, often an image of great power. Thus when he was in the Tyrol in 1846, before throwing up his Cure at Cheltenham, and whilst suffering not only from nervous exhaustion and a broken friendship, but from the doubts through which he waded from his evangelical to his liberal faith, he writes to his wife in relation to the scenery :—" Grandeur makes me misanthropic, and soft beauty makes my heart beat with a misery that I cannot describe. In Retech's illustrations of Goethe's t Faust' there is one plate where angels drop roses upon the demons who are contending for the soul of Faust ; every rose falls like molten metal, burning and blistering when it touches. It is so that loveliness does with me. It scorches when it ought to soothe." • We quote the passage not for the sake of the feeling, which Mr. Robertson know to be a symptom of morbid depression, but for the quick sense of analogy with which in his most ordinary conversations and most careless correspondence he translated every shade of feeling, whether healthy or the reverse, into a telling picturesque image. And in him the most oratorical of the sensuous percep- tions, the sense of colour, and the artistic feeling for words express- ing colour, were peculiarly keen. Mr. Brooke mentions his delight in the Brighton sunsets, and the letters in this book are full of descriptions showing an almost Turneresque wealth of observation of clouds and skies. In this kind of oratorical power he was not far short of the greatest master of it, Mr. Ruskin, who was, it appears, his contemporary at Oxford, and on one occasion Mr. Robertson's antagonist in the Union Debating Society. There is perhaps something more than mere coincidence in this. There is a certain subtle relation between the culture of an age and its relative value for the different constituents of external beauty. The value for colour which has bean shown in the Pre-Raphael- ite movement and the literature which apologized for it, in Turner's school of painting, in the richness almost to excess of Tennyson's imagery, and the oratory of Mr. Robertson's sermons, is probably closely connected with the predominance of strong emotions in the culture of the last generation, and their full and, free expression. .
This power of Mr. Robertson's no •doubt tended directly to produce the self-distrust with which he regarded his own great influence as a . preacher. He feared that because the medium of his power was a certain facility in mixing the elements which soonest excite human emotion, the end would be no more valuable than the means. Of •course that depended entirely on the truth and singleness of his aims, and that no one doubted but himself. His lucidity of judgment and sincerity of purpose made of a very dangerous gift the instrument to an end far above itself, and the theology which emerged from Mr. Robertson's oratorical treatment was by no means a rhetorical theology, but one calm, simple, and. trustful. In fact he felt that, eloquent as he was, the truth he wished to illustrate was in danger of being refracted into something much more brilliant but less true than itself by his eloquence. And so it might have been in any man less sincere and less eager to get at the pure truth. As it was, however, though all his own gifts were of the warm oratorical order, all his highest admirations were for the simple, cool, and resting order of writers. Truly as he entered into Tennyson, Wordsworth was his ideal as a poet. Thoroughly as he admired the pic- turesque and gigantesque power of Carlyle, he felt more spiritual respect for one far beneath himself in spiritual insight, simply on account of his quietness of spirit,—Channing. Hence, though Mr. Robertson was in all his attitudes and powers of mind, an orator, and an orator of a high order, his aims were all spiritual and sim- ple, and the theology which he taught, on which we will say something next week, was almost entirely liberated from those depraving oratorical influences from which theology has usually suffered so much.
Previous page
